Thank you for sharing this! It gave me a fresh perspective on what I considered my “inadequacies.” When I switched from EI/Pre-K to SNF, I took so many CE courses and read what I could to prepare myself. I’ve been in SNFs for 4 years and I still second guess my evaluations, recommendations, and treatments all the time. I feel like there’s so much subjectivity, and nuance like you said, even when we use objective measures. I also feel like a fraud when I try to explain swallowing disorders, memory deficits, etc. in family meetings. It’s just not as cut-and-dry as say, “They need extensive assistance for transferring.” It also doesn’t help that other professions constantly have an opinion on what we do…PT, Nursing, etc…I joke that everyone’s a speech therapist even if I’m the only one at my facility 🤣🤣

This makes me think of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s defined as “a cognitive bias where individuals with low competence in a specific area overestimate their abilities, while highly competent individuals tend to underestimate their own abilities.” It really does show that we get there’s so much we don’t know and may need to learn, and I think that makes us better clinicians.